A Rendezvous
by Antosha
Summary: On a mission back to the past, Luna and Ginny stumble across a mystery. Companion to A Ghost and A Conspiracy.


A Rendez-vous 

Ginny and Luna's was the simplest of the three missions, if the most grizzly: go to St. Mungo's and quietly pick up the discarded foot of Silas Fink, a Death Eater whose leg had been partially amputated following a failed attack on Alistair Moody. That the trip was to St. Mungo's of twenty-two years in the past only added to the macabre atmosphere.

Luna, of course, seemed hardly to notice. She gazed around, goggle-eyed as usual, at the Muggles streaming through the streets. "Look at that one," she said, airily, pointing at a man whose hair seemed to have been inflated with helium.

"C'mon, Luna, it's not funny for 1976," Ginny giggled to her friend. The gaudy styles of the people they passed only made her feel more nervous and off-balance.

"I didn't think it was funny. I was thinking I'd like to do my hair like that," replied Luna mistily, picking up her tangled blond hair by the ends to see what it would look like if teased and permed into gravity-defying submission. Then she got an even vaguer expression on her face. "Do you think Ron would like my hair like that?"

Ginny sighed. "I don't know, Luna. I have no idea what Ron likes, to be honest." She looked around. "I wish they had let us Apparate closer to the hospital."

"Professor Snape didn't want us to be heard," Luna said.

"Yeah," sighed Ginny, "no one heard us pop in to that automobile-smashing place, that's for certain. I've never heard a noise like that since Fred and George both got Howlers from Mum at once."

Luna gave her usual complacent smile, and then stopped dead in her tracks.

"Luna, what?"

"It's my mother," Luna said, pointing.

A tall, wispy blonde in a red dress was striding down the opposite side of the street, in what seemed to be a state of high excitement. Like Luna, she had hair that was a frizzy dirty blonde, and pale skin. The woman's eyes, however, didn't bulge out of her head--they were wide-set and quite pretty.

Luna began to walk right across the street. Ginny had to grab her by the belt to keep her from being run over by a car. "What do you think you're doing?" she gasped.

"I've got to talk to her," Luna said.

"Didn't you hear Professor McGonagall?" Ginny hissed. "We're not to interact with anyone more than we absolutely have to. If we do, we could destroy everything"

"I want to see her," Luna said, an unfamiliar urgency in her voice. "She's going in the direction of the hospital," she pleaded.

Ginny looked at her friend and took a deep breath. "You promise not to talk to her? Not to distract her?"

"Yes!" moaned Luna, but she was straining to run after her mother, pulling at Ginny's grasp like a dog worrying at its lead.

As they followed Mrs. Lovegood through the crowded streets, the tall blonde woman seemed to become increasingly agitated, moving her handbag from one side to the other, running her free hand through her hair--not exactly in nervousness, it seemed, but in anticipation.

"Where's she going?" Ginny wondered as she stumbled on, her hand still looped in Luna's belt--just in case.

"I don't know," answered Luna, who was bounding so as not to lose her mother in the press of the pedestrian crowd. "I wish all these people would get _out of the way!_" She let out an exasperated growl, and suddenly, miraculously, every one of the muggles who crowded the sidewalk stepped to one side or the other, clearing a path directly to Mrs. Lovegood. "Thank you," Luna said, and sped through the newly opened passageway.

Ginny was about to speculate that Luna's mother was headed to St. Mungo's--they were only a block or two away from the wizarding hospital--when their quarry stopped in front of a small, undistinguished-looking hotel on the corner at the far end of the block. When she spun around, Luna and Ginny pressed themselves into a doorway.

Luna's gasping breath was heavy and damp in Ginny's ear.

"What the hell is she doing here?" Ginny asked.

Luna shrugged. "I have no idea. This is--what?--six years before I was born. My dad and she were living in Ottery St. Catchpole already. She wasn't working at Ollivander's any more."

Together, the girls peaked out of the doorway. Mrs. Lovegood was scanning the other side of the street, clearly waiting for someone.

"Maybe she's meeting a school chum?" Ginny asked. "She doesn't look like she's been out of Hogwarts more than a few years."

"She didn't have many pals at school," Luna said. "Everyone thought she was a little odd. She wasn't lucky like me."

Ginny didn't know what to say to that, so she simply patted her friend on the shoulder, and looked out again. "She's very pretty."

"She was the most beautiful woman in the world." Tears were beginning to spill from Luna's pale, protuberant eyes.

Ginny mopped at the tears with her sleeve. "Shhh."

"My dad always said she was." Luna was beginning to blubber.

"I know, Luna. I know." How am I so lucky, to have such a healthy, loving, _living_ family, Ginny thought. I'm so damned lucky. I need to tell Mum and DadÉ.

The two friends hugged, and Luna's weeping slowly subsided.

When they next peaked out, the blonde woman was waving down the cross street. "Oh," Ginny said, "here we are. I wonder who..."

A tall, bespectacled, redheaded man strode across the street waving his hand over his head in a way that Ginny found all too familiar.

"Oh, damn."

"Ginny," Luna said, "isn't that your dad?"

Before Ginny could answer, her father and Luna's mother stepped into a passionate, desperate, hungry embrace.

"Oh, damn."

The couple down the street broke from their kiss, and walked into the dingy hotel hand in hand.

Luna and Ginny sank to the ground, stunned and slack-jawed.

Percy, Ginny thought. Percy's about six months old now. Charlie's almost three and Bill's just five. Oh, Daddy, how?...

How long? How could? How did? And why, of course.

Suddenly, inexplicably, Luna began to giggle.

"What could possibly be funny?" snapped Ginny, which only caused Luna to laugh more manically.

"Your dad's the Minister of Magic," Luna snorted.

"So?"

"So he can make the Department of Mysteries give him a time-turner so he can come back here and tell _them _to CUT IT OUT!" By the last word, Luna was no longer laughing. She was shouting, furious and red-faced as Ginny knew herself to be. It was a Luna that Ginny had never seen. "How could she do that to him? He loves her."

"Merlin's beard, Luna, I'm so sorry." Mr. Lovegood at his wife's funeral, hand trembling on Luna's shoulder; that had been Ginny's first real image of grief. (Harry and Professor Lupin after Sirius Black's death. Cedric Diggory's parents, over for tea.) He had looked more like a ghost than many of the specters she would later meet at Hogwarts.

Luna collapsed onto her friend's shoulder, wailing unapologetically now. The muggles streaming by barely noticed the two teenagers huddled in the dirty London doorway. One skinny, androgynous blond scuffled by singing. "Time may change me, but I can't change time..."

What do we do? Ginny thought. Do I tell Mum? Maybe she knows. Do I tell Dad I know? Do I tell Ron? Soon it was she who was crying into her friend's flaxen rat's-nest.

"What do we do, Luna?" Ginny asked once the tears slowed enough for her to talk.

The blonde girl stood. "Let's go get the be-damned foot," she said, and strode off towards St. Mungo's.

**Note: **This is a companion piece to several other HP Time Travel stories, including A Ghost and A Conspiracy.


End file.
